Erich Fromm
It takes a moment to tell someone you love them, but it takes a lifetime to prove it.Collection: Love
If other people do not understand our behavior-so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being 'asocial' or 'irrational' in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them.Collection: Hurt
An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality.Collection: Reality
Many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of 'unadjusted' individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself.Collection: Ideas
To love somebody is not just a strong feeling - it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.Collection: Strong
Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.Collection: Ability To Love
The real opposition is that between the ego-bound man, whose existence is structured by the principle of having, and the free man, who has overcome his egocentricity.Collection: Real
Hate is a product of the unfulfilled life.Collection: Life
The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.Collection: Giving Up
A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast; in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism.Collection: Character
Well-being is possible to the degree to which one has overcome one's narcissism; to the degree to which one is open, responsive, sensitive, awake, empty.... Well-being means, finally, to drop one's Ego, to give up greed, to cease chasing after preservation and the aggrandizement of the Ego, to be and to experience one's self in the act of being, not in having, preserving, coveting, using.Collection: Giving Up
People do not see that the main question is not : "Am I loved?" which is to a large extent the question : "Am I approved of? Am I protected? Am I admired?" The main question is: "Can I love?Collection: People
When people can't handle God any more, they turn to religion.Collection: People
The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears.Collection: Real
For [Karl] Marx what counts is man. He is the root of everything;while for capitalism, the aim are things, profit, and man is only a means to gain them. As an authentically religious individual, Marx could not be other than against "religion".Collection: Religious
The customer is an object to be manipulated, not a concrete person whose aims the businessman is interested to satisfy.Collection: Businessman
The member of a primitive clan might express his identity in the formula "I am we"; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an "individual," existing apart from his group.Collection: Responsibility
I believe that the experience of love is the most human and humanizing act that it is given to man to enjoy and that it, like reason, makes no sense if conceived in a partial way.Collection: Life
It is a tragedy that most of us die before we have begun to live.Collection: Death
I would say democracy once meant an organizational society and a state, in which the individual citizen is - feels - responsible, and acts responsibly, and participates in decision-making.Collection: Decision
We have faith in the potentialities of others, of ourselves, and of mankind because, and only to the degree to which, we have experienced the growth of our own potentialities, the reality of growth in ourselves, the strength of our own power of reason and love.Collection: Love
The same polarity of the male and female principle exists in nature; not only, as is obvious in animals and plants, but in the polarity of the two fundamental functions, that of receiving and penetrating. It is the polarity of earth and rain, of the river and the ocean, of night and day, of darkness and light, of matter and spirit.Collection: Ocean
Can one have love? If we could, love would need to be a thing, a substance that one can have, own, possess. The truth is, there is no such thing as love. Love is an abstraction, perhaps a goddess or an alien being, although nobody has ever seen this goddess. In reality, there exists only the act of loving. To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self increasing.Collection: Love
Exclusive love is a contradiction in itself.Collection: Love
It doesn't matter whether one uses God or doesn't. What matters is which experience a person has.Collection: What Matters
Man absolutely cannot live by himself.Collection: Helping Others
Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict; joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are only one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves.Collection: Moving
The most important things we talk about on Sundays are things to which we pay very little attention.Collection: Sunday
In the 19th century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the 20th century it means schizoid self-alienation.Collection: Mean
The application of psychoanalysis to sociology must definitely guard against the mistake of wanting to give psychoanalytic answers where economic, technical, or political facts provide the real and sufficient explanation of sociological questions. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst must emphasize that the subject of sociology, society, in reality consists of individuals, and that it is these human beings, rather than abstract society as such, whose actions, thoughts, and feelings are the object of sociological research.Collection: Real
If you take a salesman, who sells a useless commodity, he feels like a fraud.Collection: Useless
Every society by its own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feelings, and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the forms of awareness.Collection: Practice
Mobilizing the love of life is the only force that can defeat the love for the dead.Collection: Love Life
I would say that love today is a relatively rare phenomenon, that we have a great deal of sentimentality; we have a great deal of illusion about love, namely as a... as something one falls in.Collection: Fall
The state of sleep is a state of freedom in which man is not occupied with the manipulation of the outside world.Collection: Sleep
I believe that one can and must hope for a sane society that furthers man's capacity to love his fellow men, to work and create, to develop his reason and his objectivity of a sense of himself that is based on the experience of his productive energy. I believe that one can and must hope for the collective regaining of a mental health that is characterized by the capacity to love and to create.Collection: Life
All great art is by its very essence in conflict with the society with which it exists. It expresses the truth about the existence regardless of whether this truth serves or hinders the survival purpose of a given society. All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.Collection: Art
Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it.Collection: Time
Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.Collection: Hate
We must make a decision of values.Collection: Decision
Close your eyes, let your spirit start to soar, and you'll live as you've never lived before.Collection: Spiritual
The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.Collection: Anxiety
Intellectuals are hindered on the way to being, by their narcissism.Collection: Way
Ideas become powerful only if they appear in the flesh; an idea which does not lead to action by the individual and by groups remains at best a paragraph or a footnote in a book.Collection: Powerful
Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.Collection: Men
The duty to be alive is the same as the duty to become oneself, to develop into the individual one potentially is.Collection: Life
While every human being has a capacity for love, its realization is one of the most difficult achievements.Collection: Love
Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one's identity, in the many ways in which such violation is possible.Collection: Integrity
If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue - and not a vice - to love myself, since I am a human being too.Collection: Vices